Clare Winnicott

Clare Winnicott née Britton (1906-1984) was an English social worker and psychoanalyst, who helped establish the profession of social worker. Besides publishing some sixteen articles in her own right, she worked with, inspired, married, and edited the writings of D. W. Winnicott.

Life and contributions

After taking a 1-year social science course at the LSE, Clare Britton worked with deprived youngsters in Merthyr Tydfil,[1] before joining Donald Winnicott in working with child evacuees in Oxfordshire from 1941 onwards. They co-authored two publications on the experience, on the strength of which (and of her solo publication of 1945) she was appointed to head the new course on Child Care at the LSE from 1947-58.[2] There she helped establish casework as a normative element in the developing discipline of social work.[3]

While working alongside Winnicott (whom she married in 1951) Britton helped developed such key insights as the importance for children of play and of a holding environment, and of what she called the child's "first treasured possession" - something from which Winnicott would later evolve the Transitional object.[4]

In the fifties, she retrained in psychoanalysis, being analysed first by Clifford Scott and then by Melanie Klein.[5] Her influential style of social work practice mingled the daily reality of child care work, along with psychoanalytic insights.[6] In it she stressed the importance of what she called the "third object" - shared activity as a focus for communication with the child[7] - of working with the individual child's life story, and of the caseworker's readiness and ability to "live through the experience with the child as fully as possible, without denying the pain, and accepting the sadness".[8]

Selected writings

See also

References

  1. ↑ Let's Never Ask Him What to Do
  2. ↑ Let's Never Ask Him What to Do
  3. ↑ N. Horner, What is Social Work (2012) p. 94-5
  4. ↑ M. O'Laughlin, Imagining Children Otherwise (2010) p. 185
  5. ↑ B. Kahr, D. W. Winnicott (1996) p. 91
  6. ↑ M. Bowen ed., Psychoanalytic Theory for Social Work Practice (2005)
  7. ↑ M. Jacobs, D. W. Winnicott (1995) p. 137
  8. ↑ Quoted in M. R. Olsen, The Unitary Model (1978) p. 78

Further reading

External links

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